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What's the difference between PIO and GPIO?

• magicalhippo 6y ago
  GPIO = General Purpose IO[1], can be used for bitbanging or via dedicated peripherals like I2C, SPI etc. PIO = Programmable IO, a peripheral unit with programmable state machines that manipulate GPIOs. Can be used to implement SPI or similar protocols. The PIO looks quite interesting, see the datasheet[2] for more details. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_input/output https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_input/output [1]: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.p...
  • Rebelgecko 6y ago
    That's awesome, seems like it could be really helpful for interfacing with hardware (or maybe a low power mode analogous to using the ULP in an ESP32?). Sidenote, that's one helluva datasheet, over 600 pages! Great to see such thorough documentation
    • magicalhippo 6y ago
      Datasheet does look nice indeed. It's clearly written to be more approachable, which I like. Though I'd say it's "only 600 pages". For comparison the STM32F417 reference manual is 1700 pages and in addition you need to read the datasheet which is another 200 pages. Not a bad thing though, it has less numerous and less complex fixed peripherals compared to the STM32 family.
• deleted 6y ago
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